The High Court has told British intelligence services to hand over relevant files to lawyers representing Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian and one-time UK resident, facing a US military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay. Mohamed is accused of plotting to trigger a radioactive "dirty bomb" on US soil, and could face the death penalty if …

Fantastic suggestion

Sigh

Philip, I'm not trying to ascribe to you any nasty invective that you didn't already imply. Ultimately the comment to which I referred boils down to "them or us", "black or white", "with us or against us".

The suit is not an attempt to get the guy out of Gitmo at our expense, as he is clearly going to face his military tribunal in the States, but an attempt to build a defence to stop the guy being executed on the basis of a confession possibly (nay probably) obtained by torture.

You seem to confuse people's desire to allow him a fair trial as a desire to see him walk free. If he is guilty, as *seems* to be the case, by all means let him be sentenced to death. There is of course the small matter of fact that whatever crimes he /did/ commit were never committed on US soil and that he was deported without even a nod to the Pakistani justice system, but given that the Americans have him in their possession now and won't be letting him go, that is a moot point; one that is made all the more so by the fact that even if he was tried in Pakistan and found guilty of the same crimes then he would be executed there too.

There is more at stake than the life of "a danjerous Jihadist who wants to kill us". If we can't live up to our democratic principles over angry little pissants like this then why even bother fighting for them in the first place?

Fifth page footnotes...

Just a request, El Reg, if you're going to put in footnotes, why not put them at the foot of the page the reader is currently on instead of having to skip right to the end of the article to find out that it was barely worth an explanation in parenthesis?!

@Philip Posted Tuesday 26th August 2008 19:11 GMT

You have not countered any of the points made, making your claims of a lack of logic entirely vacuous.

Feebly bleating 'liberal' as a pejorative is an emotional appeal of the rankest hypocrisy, as is crying foul of a hurtful word or two.

There is no post hoc logic in the use of the conditional - If A, then B (_If_ your views are because he is a darkie, _then_ you are a racist cunt). Your logic, however, stated that B happened because of A (he was tortured because he was a terrorist), ignoring the conditional aspect, and erroneously validating the outcome.

And I would say the same things to your face, although the keyboard warrior comments are always welcome as light entertainment. You suppurating twat.

Further on, you miss the point, yet again, that you cannot be sure that this person is a vile specimen, as he has not been given the benefit of democracy, due process and decency. Anybody put through secret internment camps and sanctioned torture will come out the other with a self signed note of their guilt.

I don't particularly agree with the fact that he is coming back to the UK, I don't agree with non-discriminatory immigration in general, but I do agree with having standards and morals that do not allow us to turn our backs when there is

I (would like to) imagine that better minds that ours have reasoned why an individual would be returned to the last know country of residence. There must have been a reason to have allowed him to stay in the first place.

I don't wish to clasp terrorists to my bosom, collective or otherwise. Those convicted should be locked up and removed from society. But way to go on the attempted straw man.

But neither do I want to live in a society governed by arbitrary rules, exercised without accountability by those with power, and the ability to convict on the strength of suspicion or circumstantial evidence alone.

Addressing some of your later points:

• He _was_ resident in Britain, albeit out of the country for whatever purpose

• His attempt to enter this country by fraudulent means should surely be dealt with by UK authorities, if nothing else just to confirm that he was making a fraudulent attempt.

• We have only your word that he is a dangerous Jihadist that wishes to kill us. I hope that, if you have supporting evidence, you provide it to the relevant authorities.

• Worthless scrotes like this - You really are in possession of far more information than the rest of us. Because, of course, you would never create a fictive bogeyman character to make a point, would you.

• Surely anyone would jump at the chance to litigate if they had been held without due process. Surely anyone has the right to redress if they had been held without due process. This goes back to the crux of the matter - If he was / is such a bad man, and such a threat to grannies and children, and we are so sure of that, we (as with the US government before us) have a plethora of powers to put him away for a long time.